Tuesday, December 29, 2009

What we have to do today is make a covenant, to slit our wrists, be blood brothers on this thing [health care]...We are looking at reaching down the throat and ripping the guts out of freedom. And we may never be able to restore it if we don't man up.

Tuesday, December 22, 2009

But data compiled from federal records by Environmental Working Group, a nonprofit watchdog that tracks the recipients of agricultural subsidies in the United States, shows that Bachmann has an inner Marxist that is perfectly at ease with profiting from taxpayer largesse. According to the organization’s records, Bachmann’s family farm received $251,973 in federal subsidies between 1995 and 2006. The farm had been managed by Bachmann’s recently deceased father-in-law and took in roughly $20,000 in 2006 and $28,000 in 2005, with the bulk of the subsidies going to dairy and corn. Both dairy and corn are heavily subsidized—or “socialized”—businesses in America (in 2005 alone, Washington spent $4.8 billion propping up corn prices) and are subject to strict government price controls. These subsidies are at the heart of America’s bizarre planned agricultural economy and as far away from Michele Bachmann’s free-market dream world as Cuba’s free medical system. If American farms such as hers were forced to compete in the global free market, they would collapse.

Tuesday, December 15, 2009

Two right wing billionaires who are helping to bankroll the Radical Right's opposition to the our agenda. Excerpts:

Billionaires David and Charles Koch have been financial leaders in opposing anything that resembles a progressive agenda for years. They have been looming in the background of every major domestic policy dispute this year, and may be the most effective opponents of President Obama's policies. For example, as health care reform protesters descended upon Washington last month, few were aware, as they were greeted with dough nuts and coffee, and handed protest signs and talking points about socialized medicine, that a right-wing billionaire had paid for the meals, buses, or salaries of the helpful guides...

Koch’s hidden presence in the health care debate illustrates the extent to which the right-wing is creating, and then hiding behind, a grassroots fervor of middle-class opponents of health reform.

The AFP, founded in 1984 by David and managed day to day by the astroturf lobbyist Tim Phillips, has spent much of the year mobilizing "tea party" opposition to health reform, clean energy legislation, and financial regulations. According to an article written by a compilation of authors for Think Progress, over the years, millions of dollars in Koch money has flowed to various right-wing think tanks, front groups, and publications. At the dawn of the Obama presidency, Koch groups quickly maneuvered to try to stop his first piece of signature legislation: the stimulus. The Koch-funded group "No Stimulus" launched television and radio ads deriding the recovery package as simply "pork" spending...

Much of the fierce opposition to health reform can be credited to Koch organizations. As the health care debate began, AFP created a front group, known as Patients United, that dedicated itself to attacking Democratic health care reform proposals. The Koch brothers clearly have a financial stake in blocking reform. Koch Industry oil refineries are major carbon dioxide polluters, and George-Pacific, a Koch Industries timber subsidiary, is one of the largest contributors to the loss of carbon-sink capacity.

According to the EPA, Koch Industries is responsible for over 300 oil spills in the U.S. and has leaked three million gallons of crude oil into fisheries and drinking waters. So there are clear economic interests in why the Koch brothers would want to block regulatory enforcement, clean energy, labor, and other reforms. But part of their opposition stems from a long family tradition of funding conservative movements to shift the country to the far right.

Monday, December 14, 2009

Talk to conservatives about the financial crisis and you enter an alternative, bizarro universe in which government bureaucrats, not greedy bankers, caused the meltdown. It’s a universe in which government-sponsored lending agencies triggered the crisis, even though private lenders actually made the vast majority of subprime loans. It’s a universe in which regulators coerced bankers into making loans to unqualified borrowers, even though only one of the top 25 subprime lenders was subject to the regulations in question.

Oh, and conservatives simply ignore the catastrophe in commercial real estate: in their universe the only bad loans were those made to poor people and members of minority groups, because bad loans to developers of shopping malls and office towers don’t fit the narrative.

In part, the prevalence of this narrative reflects the principle enunciated by Upton Sinclair: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” As Democrats have pointed out, three days before the House vote on banking reform Republican leaders met with more than 100 financial-industry lobbyists to coordinate strategies. But it also reflects the extent to which the modern Republican Party is committed to a bankrupt ideology, one that won’t let it face up to the reality of what happened to the U.S. economy.

Tuesday, December 08, 2009

Friday, December 04, 2009

Take a look at the details here. And let me emphasize the central quote from the posting, from Frank Rich back in September:

To appreciate this crowd's [The Neocon War Fanatics] spotless record of failure, consider its noisiest standard-bearer, John McCain. He made every wrong judgment call that could be made after 9/11. It's not just that he echoed the Bush administration's constant innuendos that Iraq collaborated with Al Qaeda's attack on America. Or that he hyped the faulty W.M.D. evidence to the hysterical extreme of fingering Iraq for the anthrax attacks in Washington. Or that he promised we would win the Iraq war "easily." Or that he predicted that the Sunnis and the Shiites would "probably get along" in post-Saddam Iraq because there was "not a history of clashes" between them.

What's more mortifying still is that McCain was just as wrong about Afghanistan and Pakistan. He routinely minimized or dismissed the growing threats in both countries over the past six years, lest they draw American resources away from his pet crusade in Iraq.

Two years after 9/11 he was claiming that we could "in the long term" somehow "muddle through" in Afghanistan. (He now has the chutzpah to accuse President Obama of wanting to "muddle through" there.) Even after the insurgency accelerated in Afghanistan in 2005, McCain was still bragging about the "remarkable success" of that prematurely abandoned war. In 2007, some 15 months after the Pakistan president Pervez Musharraf signed a phony "truce" ceding territory on the Afghanistan border to terrorists, McCain gave Musharraf a thumb's up. As a presidential candidate in the summer of 2008, McCain cared so little about Afghanistan it didn't even merit a mention among the national security planks on his campaign Web site. He takes no responsibility for any of this. [...]

Along with his tribunes in Congress and the punditocracy, Wrong-Way McCain still presumes to give America its marching orders. With his Senate brethren in the Three Amigos, Joe Lieberman and Lindsey Graham, he took to The Wall Street Journal's op-ed page to assert that "we have no choice" but to go all-in on Afghanistan -- rightly or wrongly, presumably -- just as we had in Iraq. Why? "The U.S. walked away from Afghanistan once before, following the Soviet collapse," they wrote. "The result was 9/11. We must not make that mistake again."

This shameless argument assumes -- perhaps correctly -- that no one in this country remembers anything.

Wednesday, December 02, 2009

*When on earth did Tiger Woods' personal problems become anyone else's business? Since when does he owe anyone an explanation for his private behavior? Why do so many people think they have the right to know intimate details of his life that are none of their concern? Celebrities are not our property; we don't own them, we don't have any right to know about their lives at home, and they owe us absolutely nothing. A lot of Americans can't seem to grasp these facts.

*And speaking of celebrities, anyone who obsesses about the weight, clothing, hairstyles, or dating lives of famous people is fit for little else intellectually than reading Us and People magazines. People who are morbidly interested in such things are wasting their lives and their minds, in my humble opinion. Then again, these people may have such humdrum and ordinary lives that they must lose themselves in the lives of others. That's even sadder.

*John McCain has been on the major Sunday talk shows repeatedly since he lost the 2008 election by 9.5 million votes and an electoral vote of 365-173. Why? He has proposed no major legislation, he isn't part of the Republican Senate leadership, and his responses to almost any question are tiresomely predictable. Why is he given a platform so often?

*For that matter, as I have said, who really gives a damn what a pathetic, know-nothing amateur like Charles Krauthammer thinks about foreign policy? That the brilliant and insightful Juan Cole, who actually speaks four different Middle Eastern/South Asian languages and is deeply knowledgeable about the Middle East, is heard far less often than a neocon fanatic like Krauthammer, is a damning indictment of our so-called "mainstream" media.

*Salon employs both the brilliant and invaluable Glenn Greenwald and the wretched, demented Camille Paglia. What kind of corporate thinking is reflected in this? I won't be giving a cent to Salon as long as they give Paglia an outlet for her Limbaugh worship, her Obama bashing, and her non-stop lies and distortions. Period.

*If I believed in karma, I would consider it karmic justice that the horrible, pathologically selfish Ayn Rand died of lung cancer because she refused to believe government-issued warnings about the danger of smoking. Gee, what a shame.

*Those who believe in the "Magic of the Free Market" should check out the story of how George Steinbrenner, perhaps the richest owner in all of sports, got the city of New York's taxpayers to finance his grotesque new stadium. Look at it here. Again, for the hundredth time: there is no free market in America. There is a rigged market in which the rich and powerful manipulate the law to benefit themselves. Anyone who thinks otherwise needs to get their head out of the Dreamworld.

*President Obama said withdrawal from Afghanistan would start in July 2011 contingent on conditions on the ground at that time. The Right Wing Eternal War Machine has ignored that part and is saying that the President is "comforting" our enemies by "setting a deadline". Are the people who hurl this filth simply: A. Inattentive B. Insanely hostile to anything Barack Obama proposes C. Stupid D. Some gruesome combination of all of the above?

*For all you Democrats and Independents who lean Democratic who don't feel like voting in 2010, remember this: if you don't vote, you're handing America back to the people who wave signs with swastikas and Barack Obama's picture on them. You're handing America to the Sarah Palin fan club. You're handing our nation over to religious fanatics who hate everything our Constitution stands for and who consider you a class of anti-American subhumans. You're turning America over to the sickest, most malicious political opposition I have seen in my entire lifetime. Can you really live with that? Remember: the Perfect is the Enemy of the Good. President Obama isn't perfect by a long shot, but ask yourself this: which America do you want--Barack Obama's or Glenn Beck's?